What’s the Most Reliable Windows Laptop Made?

This doesn’t surprise us, but Soluto found the “best” Windows laptop (by their criteria) is an Apple. Some will point out that it isn’t a fair fight, because the Apple has a clean Windows installation, whereas the Windows laptops it was competing against had whatever “additional” software the manufacturers load onto their machines, but we’d also point out that this testing didn’t measure the Apple’s greatest advantages – long term reliability of components, the ability to clone the systems easily, disk transfer mode…we could go on and on.

It’s important to remember that Apple has a very different philosophy than most other PC manufacturers. Low cost is not their goal; customer experience is. And that doesn’t end with the sort of “ooh, it’s aluminium” design experience that’s obvious looking at their products, but also the choice of the components inside the computer. The engineering and design of everything from the screens to the fans in the systems are usually unique to Apple. Apple has this leeway precisely because it is not designing to a cost the way Hewlett Packard, for instance, is. If Apple finds it can cool a Macbook more efficiently with a custom-shaped fan blade and also reduce noise by 3db, they’ll do it, even if that fan costs $4 more per unit. HP and the others usually can not afford to do that. For one thing, they don’t have the margins to support that, and for another, they produce too many different products within their computer lines. What I mean by that is, Apple produces three notebook lines, the Macbook Pro Retina, Macbook Pro, and Macbook Air. They come in different sizes but they share many components such as fans, speakers, various connectors, etc. Now they make those models in the millions, and can amortize that custom design across all those systems…HP sells more computers, but usually sells far fewer per model line, so they can’t afford to custom design all of those parts.

In the end, it adds up to more reliable, longer-lived systems. Yes, they tend to cost more upon purchase, yet they have longer useful lives and fewer problems during those working lives. This is why we favor Apple hardware, even when running Windows. And this is just one facet. If you want to know more, look for a more thorough rundown on the advantages of Apple computers in the coming days.